This paper investigates the consequences of children's exposure to state-level incarceration rates on social mobility in the United States. The study uses social mobility data from the Opportunity Atlas for children born between 1978 and 1983. Jail population data is gathered from the 1985 and the 1995 Annual Survey of Jails. To analyze the impact of jail rates on social mobility, we estimate OLS regressions with state-level control variables. Of key interest is the potential differential effect of early (age 2-7) versus later (age 12-17) exposure. All estimates indicate a negative correlation between incarceration and social mobility. The main results indicate that exposure to incarceration rates during adolescence has a larger impact on social mobility. Further, the subgroup estimates indicate that female incarceration is a more effective determinant of social mobility and that the black and the female population are more sensitive to fluctuations in incarceration rates. The estimates by income percentiles show incoherent results. The results should be treated with caution to methodological issues and potential biases.

This dissertation consists of three chapters concerning topics in economic history and labor economics. The first chapter studies how the 1906 San Francisco Fire impacted the biographies of those who lost their homes in the fire, while the second chapter shows that destination quality is a key determinant for the returns to childhood migration. The third chapter proposes a novel strategy to estimate the gender wage gap. The first chapter explores the short- and long-run consequences of the 1906 San Francisco Fire, one of the largest urban fires in American history. I use linked US Census records to follow San Francisco residents and their sons from 1900 to 1940. Implementing a spatial regression discontinuity design across the boundary of the razed district to identify the effect of the fire, I find that the fire displaced households away from San Francisco in the short- and medium-term, it forced men into lower-paying occupations, and out of entrepreneurship. Constructing a novel measure of kin presence, I provide suggestive evidence for risk-sharing among extended family in San Francisco, which mitigated the disruptive effects of the fire. While individuals recover over time in many dimensions, the negative effect on business ownership is persistent over decades. Moreover, affected children have lower educational attainment. Therefore, my findings reject the hope for a “reversal of fortune” for the victims, in contrast to what is found for more recent natural disasters such as hurricane Katrina. In the second chapter, I show that destination quality, measured as average educational attainment among permanent residents, is a key determinant for the returns to childhood migration in Indonesia. First, I document that average differences in educational outcomes are small between children who moved domestically and those who did not. However, conditional on having migrated, destination turns out to be very important. Exploiting variation in the age of migration, I show that children who spend more time growing up in better districts have higher graduation rates and more years of completed schooling. These effects are persistent and result in better labor market outcomes. In the third chapter (joint with Hannah Illing and Linh Tô), we propose a novel strategy to estimate the gender wage gap by comparing men and women who succeed each other in the same job position. We identify unexpected worker deaths in German social security data in 1980-2019, and then compute the wage gap between the deceased worker and their successor for different gender combinations. We find that holding the job position constant, men who replace deceased women earn substantially higher wages. The opposite is true when women follow deceased men. The implied "replacement gender wage gap" in the 1980 to 2019 period is about 15 to 19 percent. In addition, we find that the gap has decreased over time, and it is higher in West Germany compared to East Germany.

The aim of this thesis was to study the intergenerational socioeconomic mobility of second generation immigrant daughters in Germany, by measuring how the parents’ educational level affect their children’s education. By adding a gender equality index to the dataset, the aim was to create a more nuanced interpretation of the results, including how cultural views in the parents’ source country can affect the parental investments. The results imply that daughters seem to have a lower intergenerational mobility, in line with previous research. When interacting a gender equality index variable with the parents’ educational level the results suggested that a high educated father from a country with high gender equality will increase both his son’s and daughter’s educational attainment. On the other hand, a high educated mother from a country with high gender equality will instead decrease her son’s educational level. Furthermore, another interaction variable was generated to translate how the parents’ educational level affects second generation immigrant children but failed to produce estimates on a statistically significant level. Nonetheless, it is important to notice that the results implied that both sons and daughters have a lower educational level than their fathers, and that daughters have a lower educational attainment than their mothers. This suggests that second generation immigrant children do not outperform their parents, as previous research suggests.

This study seeks to replicate and extend Roksa and Potter's (2011) analysis of the association between intergenerational family background and academic outcomes by utilizing the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 to examine alternative methods for operationalizing maternal educational background. Results indicate a positive association between maternal upward mobility and adolescent academic achievement. Measures of mobility affect adolescent achievement even when controlling for both mother's and maternal grandmother's educational attainment. Future research should examine the differential impact of extreme mobility, specifically downward mobility, on adolescent academic outcomes.

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This dissertation is composed of three essays examining adoption of agricultural technologies in Ecuador and intergenerational mobility in the United States. The first essay entitled 'Does IPM Have Staying Power? Revisiting a Potato-producing Area Years After Formal Training Ended' examines (Integrated Pest Management) IPM spread and adoption several years after formal intensive IPM outreach efforts ceased in a potato-producing region in Ecuador. It describes adoption patterns and sources of IPM knowledge in 2012 and compares them with patterns that existed when outreach ceased in 2003. Results show that IPM adoption continues in the area but with a lower proportion of farmers adopting all practices and a higher proportion adopting low to moderate levels compared to 2003. Farmer-to-farmer spread has supplanted formal training and outreach mechanisms. IPM adoption significantly lowers pesticide use and saves production costs for adopters. The second essay entitled 'Can Text Messages Improve Agricultural Outreach in Ecuador?' seeks to understand how receipt of text messages complements training from a farmer field day. It measures the effect of text message receipt on adoption of (Integrated Crop Management) ICM technologies and knowledge about these technologies. In the first part of the paper, we present a theory of behavioral change and its application to adoption of agricultural technologies. In the second part, we use intention to treat (ITT) and an improved-ITT analyses to measure the impact of the intervention. The results of this essay suggest that as providers of information, text messages have some knowledge building effect leading to the adoption of IPM practices. As reminders, text messages effectively increase adoption of IPM practices, in particular recommended pesticides. The third essay entitled 'Determinants of Absolute Upward Income Mobility: The Hidden Cost of Commuting' focuses on commuting times as a determinant of upward income mobility in the United States. We provide an explanation of the channel through which the effect of commuting times on upward income mobility operates. Additionally, it evaluates empirically the effect of commuting on upward income mobility. The empirical results confirm the theoretical model predictions that commuting times affect negatively upward income mobility. / Ph. D.

This PhD thesis focuses on determinants of labour market outcomes in development economics with a special interest in South Africa and China. After an introduction in chapter 1, the key chapter 2, Ethnic Diversity and Labour Market Outcomes: Evidence from Post-Apartheid South Africa joint with Sara Tonini, investigates how ethnic diversity amongst black South Africans affects their employment opportunities in the post-Apartheid era. We find that ethnic diversity has a positive impact on the employment rate of the black South Africans, and it only affects ethnic groups with relatively large population size. To address the endogeneity of ethnic composition, we explore the location of historical “black homelands” and argue that districts more equally distant to multiple homelands are more ethnically diverse. In our instrumental variable regressions, a one standard deviation increase in ethnic diversity index increases employment rate by 3 (5) percentage point in 1996 (2001), which is around 8% (13%) of the average employment rate. We then propose a model of a coordination game to explain these findings. A more ethnically diverse place requires a higher rate of inter-ethnic communication to maintain social connection. As inter-ethnic communication requires more skills than intra-ethnic connection, people in ethnically diverse districts are motivated to invest more in social skills to be able to communicate with those outside their own group. The acquisition of these social skills makes them better equipped for the labour market. The remaining two chapters look into the intergenerational transmission of socio-economic status in South Africa and China. Chapter 3, Returns to Education, Marital Sorting and Family Background in South Africa joint with Patrizio Piraino, applies the model of Lam (1993, JPE) which combines intergenerational transmission of ability and assortative mating to investigate the relative explanatory power of father-in-law’s and father’s background for male wages. In the empirical analysis, after correcting for potential measurement errors in earnings and education, we find that father-in-law’s schooling is more correlated with male workers’ labour market earnings, employment rate and labour force participation than own father’s schooling in contemporary South Africa. This difference is more obvious when parental educational levels are higher. Chapter 4, Higher Education Expansion and Intergenerational Mobility in Contemporary China, studies how higher education affects the upward mobility of people from relatively disadvantaged families. Intergenerational occupational mobility is stimulated when children from different social classes end up in similar occupations. Whether or not they have similar occupational status depends not only on their level of education but also the occupational returns to education. Given there is already a convergence in educational achievements between children from different social classes in contemporary China, in this paper, I focus on their occupational returns to education. Occupational status is measured by the widely-accepted ISEI scaling system ranging from 16 to 90 points with large number indicating higher occupational status. I take advantage of an exogenous college expansion policy in 1999 as a natural experiment and find that one additional year of education increases the occupational status of their first job by 2.243 (2.774) points on average along the ISEI scale in OLS (IV) regressions. And children from upper-class families do not necessarily have higher returns to education than children from other social classes. The average occupational returns to education are higher for the most recent job than the first job, but the difference among social classes is still not significant.

All three essays in this thesis are concerned with the interrelation of family, gender and labour market outcomes. The first paper investigates family earnings mobility between parents and sons, and parents and daughters, highlighting the role of assortative mating. The results suggest that daughters are more mobile than sons. I also find that Sweden has a higher degree of mobility compared to the U.S., and that assortative mating is an important underlying channel for earnings transmission. The difference in mobility between the two countries does not inherently depend on factors affecting the marriage match. Moreover, adult economic outcomes are more dependent on family background for those at the lower end of the earnings distribution. The second study analyses the long-run effects of an increase in family size on the 1980-2005 labour market outcomes of Swedish men and women. The decision to have (more) children is dependent on current and future labour market prospects. I use the exogenous variations in the sex composition of the first two children to overcome this endogeneity problem. My findings suggest that having an additional child has a stronger negative impact on earnings than on participation. However, mothers experience a substantial but not complete long-term recovery in earnings. The third paper illustrates the difficulty in disentangling the underlying channels of intergenerational earnings persistence using a path analysis model. On closer examination, such a model has a potential shortcoming since the covariates are correlated to other unobserved factors. The results suggest that education is the most influential mechanism in the earnings transmission process, while IQ, mental ability and BMI are of secondary importance. However, education is sensitive to the inclusion of other covariates and the order in which these are entered into the equation. / At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Manuscript. Paper 3: Manuscript.